


Hand in Mine

by snowshus



Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: Episode coda: Cibola Burn, Hand Jobs, M/M, Semi-Public Sex, background Naomi Nagata/Jim Holden, graphic depiction of lost body parts, graphic description of medical procedures, wound care leads to comfort sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:33:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24135904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowshus/pseuds/snowshus
Summary: Alex treats Amos' injuries after Ilus.
Relationships: Amos Burton/Alex Kamal
Comments: 10
Kudos: 95
Collections: Hurt Comfort Exchange 2020





	Hand in Mine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tangerine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tangerine/gifts).



> Thank you to Ictus for all your help!

“Can’t believe you got shot again,” Alex says, pressing the injector against the thickest part of Amos’ bicep. It stings when the needle punches through the skin but the feeling swiftly disappears as the drugs do their work. Part nerve blocker and part sedative, they quickly deaden his arm and slowly erode his mind’s capacity for thought. He doesn’t mind so much the way it makes everything go sort of hazy. 

When Amos had been a kid, maybe a year or so before he’d escaped the inexorable pull of Earth, he would lie in a leaky little row boat and let the river float him down towards the abandoned island. The boat would rock gently while he stared up at the eternally grey sky trying to catch a glimpse of sunlight. The drugs felt kind of like that, like he was back on the boat far away from everything, trying to peer through clouds. 

“He was gonna kill the Cap,” Amos slurs. Alex picks up his numb hand and starts to unwrap Doc’s bandages. Amos can’t feel the texture of Alex’s gloves, or the brush of the loosened bandages, but every now and then he’s distantly aware of pressure as Alex lifts or turns his hand. 

“He could’ve killed you.”

“’S my job.”

Alex stops moving. The bandages are hanging from Amos’ thumb and there’s that pressure again, distant and detached from any other sensation. 

“You’re an engineer,” Alex finally says. “That’s your job.”

Amos nods. That is his job when they’re on Roci, but it’s not his important job. Naomi could take care of their girl if Amos didn’t come back. There’s a reason she’s Boss. Amos is good at ships, but Naomi is better. His second job—and it’s the important one, the one only he can do—is to make sure the rest of them don’t die. He’s the expendable one. His job can be covered by someone else and he’s not like the rest of them. They’re good. They want to do good and they know how. Amos wants to do good too, but he only ever learned how to do bad. And bad, it just piles up and up without end. 

Alex drops the dirty wrap in a metal bowl to be sanitized later. He opens a package and the room is filled with the sharp scent of alcohol. It burns Amos’ nose, and he assumes it would probably be cold on his skin if he could feel. Alex moves with practiced ease, dragging the cloth around his wrist and over his palm, clearing away the caked blood and dirt and sweat that had mixed together under the bandages. 

Amos wonders if it’s wrong to like this: the way Alex has taken over medical stuff. Pilots aren’t supposed to be comfortable treating gunshot wounds. He does like it, though. He likes when all of Alex’s attention is on him, likes watching Alex’s hands moving across his skin without hesitation—even if he can’t feel it. Alex doesn’t touch people all that much, not like Cap or Noami, or Amos himself does. He doesn’t avoid touching them or get weird about it when any of them touch him, so Amos doesn’t think it’s a thing, just thought he wasn’t really a touchy guy. But whenever Amos was in this chair, Alex would touch him like Amos belonged to him. Amos wants to belong to Alex, to be someone Alex would want to touch all the time. 

“Nerve blocker is still going strong? You don’t feel this, right?” Alex asks, brushing his finger back and forth across the back of Amos’ hand. If he hadn’t been watching he wouldn’t have noticed anything at all.

“Don’t feel anything.”

“Good, cause if you did this would probably hurt a whole hell of a lot.” 

Alex passes a knife across the ragged edges of what remains of Amos’ middle fingers. His mind weakly protests that he should be in pain, but nothing is coming. Blood starts sluggishly pumping out of the newly opened wounds, and Alex presses a fresh wet cloth against them. It’s got that same burning smell as alcohol, but something a little sweeter mixed in too. He stays there, Amos’ hand held between his for five minutes, when the autodoc makes a quiet ping. Amos stares at their joined hands, memorizing the exact places where Alex’s fingers were pressed so later when he can feel his hand again he could press his fingers there and imagine he was feeling Alex’s hands. The callouses would be all wrong though. 

When he takes the cloth away, the bleeding has stopped, and a film of clear liquid is congealing on Amos’ hand. 

“Don’t move,” Alex instructs, setting Amos’ hand on an angled white armrest. He slides two plastic cylinders over the stubs and tightens the clasps over the gel. A big white box with wires connecting to the tubes is attached to the back of his hand. It lights up when a lead is placed against the inside of his arm. Alex slides the autodoc off and collects the bloody cloth and bandages and bits of body parts into the metal bowl before disappearing behind Amos. 

Amos tilts his head back to watch as Alex pulls his gloves off and throws everything into the sanitation chamber. The metal bowl hits the inside wall with a bang. Usually when people throw things it means they’re upset. Cap throws things a lot. Alex leans against the counter, his knuckles whiten and his head bows, and all Amos can see is the line of his neck dipping into his shirt. 

“Goddammit,” he whispers lowly, and Amos isn’t sure what he’s upset about. Everything worked out fine. It was pretty dicey for a while, sure, and Amos isn’t exactly sure he’s okay, but he’s gotten a sense that maybe he hasn’t been okay for a really long time, so that’s not so different. They’re all breathing, and as long as they're breathing it’s okay. He just really wants Alex to touch him again. 

“How long do I gotta stay in this thing?” he asks, bringing Alex’s attention back to him.

“It’s just a few fingers so a day or so I imagine. Never really seen one of these in action before, so your guess is as good as mine.” Alex grabs one of the stools and slides it across the floor, locking it in place before sitting down, even though they’re still on planet. 

“You’ll be able to unplug and be mobile again after the 5 hours, so you won’t be stuck in the chair the whole time.” Alex knits his fingers together in his lap, so close and yet out of reach. “I’m really glad you didn’t die.”

“You too.”

Alex stares at his hands for a long moment before reaching out and squeezing Amos’ calf reassuringly. He can feel the weight of it, the heat, the way the cloth of his pants bunches under the pressure of Alex’s fingers. “Get some rest okay. I’ll be back later.” 

Amos nods and feels the slide of Alex’s fingers across his leg as he walks away. With nothing else to concentrate on, the quiet tug of the painkillers finally manages to pull his mind into darkness.

When he opens his eyes, Naomi is sitting next to him, carding her hands through his short hair. “Hey there. We have to go back into orbit,” she explains, reaching over him to strap him down. “I want to say thank you for bringing him home.” She rubs his arm and leans down to press a kiss to his forehead. “I’m glad you’re both safe.” 

The Roci grumbles and whines as she struggles out of the atmosphere. The Gs press on them as Ilus’ gravity tries to drag them back down. The weight on Amos’ bruised ribs and missing hand is white burning pain. Amos grits his teeth and tries not to pass out. 

And then it’s gone. 

The sudden weightlessness signals that they've broken the atmosphere. No advances in crash strap technology seem to be able to prevent the centimeter of give that leaves them floating slightly above their chairs. A missed roll of white bandages floats up in the corner before they all drop gently as Alex moves them to 0.1 thrust. Just enough G for healing. 

Noami takes his good hand in her long, bony fingers and sits with him. The Doc comes in and takes samples of everyone’s blood, checks Alex and Noami’s eyes-just in case-and sets up her testing. People wander in and out. When the autodoc deems Murty across the medbay is healthy enough to move, Cap comes back to drag him to whichever room they’ve decided to lock him in. Amos waits in his chair as his fingers rebuild themselves: bone then muscles then fat then skin, bit by bit. 

After five hours the light on the white box that sits awkwardly atop his hand switches from blinking red to green, freeing Amos to unplug the glove. He wanders the ship, relearning her steps and surfaces. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, or where he’s going until he makes his way up to ops.

Alex is predictably sitting on the top step of the ladder to the nose. His hands are crossed in front of his mouth. 

“You’re up,” Alex notes. 

Amos holds up his hand where the middle phalanxes are starting to grow.

“I talked to Cap, about what went down while we were stuck up here.” Alex says, like it means something. Amos isn’t sure what part of the nightmare of the past week he’s talking about though. “If the world was ending, you said you’d take me with you when you jumped,” Alex clarifies. 

Amos does recall this conversation, though he doesn’t understand how it relates to anything that happened while they were seperated.

“You tried to go without me.”

Oh, right. “You were pretty far away, and it’s not like you were going to be much longer in following me,” Amos offers half apologetically. Even if the Roci had managed to avoid the inevitable orbital decay, eventually Alex and Noami would have run out of food crawling away from Ilus.

“I’m a better pilot than that. Next time you think the world is ending, you hang on long enough to find me.”

That’s not what Amos was expecting. He thought he’d get another version of the never give up on life talks, like the one Cap had given him. “Okay.”

“Good. Glad we got that squared.” Alex descends the ladder, stopping on the lowest step, leaving him slightly taller than Amos. He picks up Amos’ injured hand, and the nerve blockers are long out of his system. He can feel the roughened skin of Alex’s fingers against his wrist as Alex turns his hand over to inspect the healing fingers. “We really could have lost you.”

“People like me, we get chewed up in the churn all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means something to me,” Alex says, like it matters what he wants--that because Amos’ life means something to him, it should mean something to the whole damn universe. 

Amos has never been good at either words or people. There are rules that govern most of the people he interacted with, rules he’s understood more or less. Alex doesn’t play the same games Amos had learned, and Amos has spent a lot of his time with him feeling like he’s missing a step. He isn’t sure this isn’t one of those times. 

Alex’s thumb moves across the bump of Amos’ wrist and Amos curls his fingers around the back of Alex’s neck, the way he had the first time he’d promised to take Alex with him if the world ended. Alex leans into it, tilts his head so Amos’ thumb brushes against the stubble on his cheek. He wishes he knew the rules of Alex’s world. He wishes this didn’t feel so much like he’s guessing, flying blind as he leans up, lips barely brushing the chapped edges of Alex’s dry lips.

Alex drops his hand. 

Amos has messed up. He always messes up with Alex, always makes the wrong move, reads the situation wrong, or comes up with the wrong solution. He’s always missing that step. He wanted - it doesn’t really matter.

Suddenly there are hands on his face, thumbs pressing against his cheeks and fingers curled around his ear and digging into his scalp as Alex drags him closer, presses his lips against Amos’, desperate and demanding. Amos’ hand tightens in Alex’s hair, the dark strands catching between his fingers, and Alex tilts his head with the pull. His lips slide across Amos’, parting slightly. Amos knows the steps for this. The glove presses uncomfortably into the bottom of his fingers as he wraps his hand around Alex’s waist and drags him off the steps, light as anything in the low G, the only resistance from the gentle magnetic tug from the boots. 

“Wait.” Alex pulls back. His hands slips from Amos’ face as the boots tug him back down to the deck. “You can’t be putting no pressure on that hand. You break that seal, things will be getting ugly real fast.” 

Alex’s hands are back on his, checking the glove again. Heeding Alex’s warning, Amos presses in again, leaving his injured hand where it is, cradled in Alex’s palms. 

“We shouldn’t-lot of strange folk on the ship right now.”

“Yeah,” Amos agrees, capturing Alex’s mouth again anyways. The Docs aren’t likely to be coming up to ops and considering the amount of times Amos has turned down what he thought was an empty corridor to find Cap and Noami in the middle of something it would just be a fair turn-around if they walk in on him. 

Alex’s fingers curl into his shirt, his knuckles bumping against Amos’ sternum. He pulls Amos towards him as he backs up the steps towards the pilot’s nose. Their mouths slide together, never seperating for long. Ages ago, when they’d just been getting to know each other, Alex had told him flying was better than sex. Even then, Amos had wanted to prove him wrong, had thought about saying, “That’s because you haven’t had sex with me.” He hadn’t because fucking in the crew was a bad idea, but they aren’t crew now. They’re family. And Amos has had plenty of time in the intervening year to imagine all the things he’d like to do to Alex in this chair. He isn’t sure which one he wants first as he slides his hands under the lapel of Alex’s flight suit.

“Hand,” Alex murmurs into his mouth, grabbing his wrist.

“I’m being careful.” 

“Just let me, okay.” Alex turns them around, pushing Amos down into his chair. In all his fantasies, Amos had never considered being the one in the chair with Alex bent over him, one hand braced behind him and the other pulling open Amos’ pants while his tongue slips between Amos’ lips. 

Alex’s fingers slip into his underwear to curl around his dick. Amos has had a lot of hands on his dick, from professionals to enthusiastic amateurs. Alex is not objectively good at this. His grip isn’t tight enough, his hands too dry, and his technique is pretty basic; just up and down in a simple, if erratic, rhythm. And it’s fucking fantastic. It’s _Alex,_ and he’s whispering Amos’ name against his lips, along with things like “wanted this” and “can’t lose you.” 

Alex’s lips on his and his hand in Amos’ pants are the only two points of contact. Alex hovers above Amos like a ghost, just out of reach—and that won’t do. Amos doesn’t need two hands to move him, not in this low of thrust. He leaves his bad hand on the console like a good boy, and uses his good one, with all of it’s fingers, to pull Alex onto his lap. 

Low G sex is weird. Alex is on top of him, their legs tangled together, and Amos has got the chair reclined so Alex’s weight should be resting where his hand is pressing against Amos’ chest for balance. But there isn’t any. Just the lightest touch for balance. Amos has missed that most; the weight of another person pulled down against him by full force of gravity. They’re not in zero G, and Alex isn’t going to float away if Amos doesn’t hold onto him, but it still feels like he’s not really there.

Alex’s hand moves, comes up to run his fingers over Amos’ mouth. He can feel heat, taste the salt and grease and antiseptic still lingering, and that’s what he wants, what he needs—skin, more skin. He tugs haphazardly on the zipper of Alex’s flight suit, pushing it off his shoulder and pulling on the sleeve with the one hand. 

“Okay, okay,” Alex whispers leaning back to tug his arms free of the suit. Amos follows him up, presses his mouth to the soft skin below his jaw, feeling the pulse at his throat under his lips. He slips his hand under Alex’s shirt, feels the warmth of the smooth skin on his stomach and the coarse hair running down towards his groin. He follows it down, curls his hand around Alex, thick and hot and leaking with every brush of Amos’ thumb over the head. Amos has done this for a lot of guys, he’s very good at it and he plans to leverage all that hard-earned skill to make Alex come apart above him. 

Alex’s hand digs into his shoulders as he works, five points of solid pressure anchoring them together. Alex’s arm presses into Amos’ chest, and he’s caught between Amos’ teeth at his neck and Amos’ hand in his pants. Their legs tangle in the chair, pressed together side to side. The hand still wrapped around Amos’ dick has lost any sense of rhythm, but it doesn’t matter; Amos is so close, and he has what he needs. Alex is all around him, touching everywhere, and he feels so very real against him, his breath hot against Amos’ ear as he pants every Martian curse he knows. 

“Shit, Amos,” Alex breathes out, forcing Amos’ head back enough for another kiss that falls into a wordless press of foreheads as he spills into Amos’ hand. Amos watches him fall apart in close up. The parting of his lips, the shadow of black eyelashes against the skin of his cheek. The dark depth of his pupils as his eyes open, catching Amos looking.

Amos slides his hand into his own pants, wraps his fingers around Alex’s hand. He guides Alex’s hand the way he likes and Alex watches him. Amos can’t look away either. He’s trapped here, pressed down into this chair by the weight of Alex’s gaze. It’s almost as good as gravity. Coming is a surprise, the build is so slow and Amos is so distracted with the exact shade of the ring of brown around Alex’s pupils. It sneaks up on him and all of sudden he’s curling up, the breath pulled out of him by the intensity of the feeling. His eyes close against his will, and there’s the light press of lips against the corner of his mouth. 

“I got you.” The words press against his skin, marking him as Alex’s in some invisible way. Alex’s hand trails down his shoulder to where Amos’ injured hand is laying, mostly forgotten. He rests his hand delicately over the white box, his fingers brush against the exposed bits of skin. 

There’s a feeling that had started growing in Amos at the same time as the green shit in his eyes. It had filled up the growing darkness until it was overflowing, spreading from its origin into all the corners of his life, even here, forcing the realization that at some point he had started believing in a future. If you have no expectation of a tomorrow there isn’t anything else they can take from you. You’re always helpless to the whims of a cruel and uncaring universe. There’s nothing to want or hope for, nothing to plan for. You just take it, whatever the universe wants to deal you. Amos had started though, had started wanting and hoping and planning for a future he believed would happen. He had things to lose, things he desperately didn’t want to lose. Everything is altering under the weight of this new feeling. He finds Alex’s hand, finds the space to twist their fingers together, and holds on maybe a little too tight.

“I was afraid I’d never see you again.”


End file.
